You could buy a 3-D printer from Stratasys in 1990, but it cost $178,000! The printing unit was $130,000 and the Silicon Graphics workstation with slicing softw

You could buy a 3-D printer from Stratasys in 1990, but it cost $178,000! The printing unit was $130,000 and the Silicon Graphics workstation with slicing software to run it was $48,000 more. So the technology was there, but two orders of magnitude too expensive for the consumer market. Patents account for part of the cost, but the computer to control it was also way too expensive, as well as the custom (vs commoditized) mechanical components. Link: https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=stratasys https://books.google.com/books?id=0bqdMvDMv74C&pg=PA32&dq=st...